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It's here. It's new. It's freshmeat II. (/me quits rhyming) -- Way too much time has passed since the last rewrite. The first baby-blue freshmeat went online Jan 1st 1999, more than 2 years ago. Here's baby-blue freshmeat II, codenamed 'Verdi'. Besides being completely restructured database wise to better cope with with the project data, this release incorporates most of the features users requested in the past months. Click the link for a quick rundown. Update: Yes, you convinced me the select boxes suck and as such they will be replaced with link icons as soon as I get a chance. One fundamental change is the replacement of the appindex by a project index, which is split into projects, branches and releases. Every project may have multiple branches, each standing for a development tree (like stable, beta, etc.). Branches can have their own URLs, licenses and releases attached to them, which means, there's separate project histories for each branch. Right now, all projects only have a 'default' branch, containing the old appindex URLs and release history. Ownership of records is a bit up in the air. There was no sane way to import the user/project relations of the old freshmeat, therefore all project records are owned by nobody right now. Changing ownership is a piece of cake though, just use the change owner link in the left menu on the project page if a project belongs to you. As a developer, your next step should be to create additional branches for your project (if you have more than one) or rename the default branch using the add new branch and update branch links respectively. Another big change is the replacement of our ancient 2-level category scheme with the trove map, filled with the category tree from SourceForge. For a smooth changeover, the old appindex categories have been imported as trove root parent 'Old Appindex' with their corresponding sections and categories attached. All projects now have to be recategorized for the real trove tree. This can be done by the record owner (see above) in real-time with a nice two pane interface. After the change-over period went through, you're able to limit browsing views and search results either on-the-fly (using the [filter] links on the corresponding result pages) or mask out categories permanently (using your account's filter abilities). The either hated or beloved urgency field has been superseded by release focus. This allows for more fine grained definition of each release, ranging from security fixes to bugfixes to feature enhancements. Registered users can also filter on release focus types, i.e. permanently mask out releases with release focus such-and-such. Web-based instant messaging is here! Some of you may know this from my personal website poocs.net already. Now it's available for all freshmeat users. You can send instant messages online to any logged in user through the user's personal page. No longer will you search in vain for friends or associates on the Net. Yes, *ahem*, I borrowed that from the ICQ homepage. Still, I guess you get the idea. All in all, being a registered user pays off even more now. You can set sort options for the frontpage and search results permanently in your preferences, post comments with signature, get replies to your comments by email, receive comments posted to your projects by email, spam-protect your account using a fake email address, use instant messaging and filters (see above) and much more, like subscribing to a project (or specific branches) to be notified when a new release comes out. Our article section has been unified and expanded to add additional original content to freshmeat, like reviews, tutorials and editorials. Those will pop up over the course of a few weeks, so stay tuned. Also, freshmeat's stats/hall of fame thingy is more prominent now (yes, I tried to hide it in the about section before) and will be expanded even more as soon as the fm II launch dust has settled. To close off, I know I'll be slaughtered for using style-sheets, javascript and cookies. Yes, freshmeat II looks best in Netscape 6/Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer (read: browsers that half-way support stylesheets). But it also looks somewhat nice in the majority of other browsers (with the exception of telnet). ill render it usable just as well as Netscape 4, which many of you still use. My point in using those 'evil technologies' is, that sooner or later more people will be using browsers supporting them and since I was doing a 100% rewrite of the site it didn't make sense to develop non state-of-the-art user interface only to revamp everything again when the time is right, which I suppose would be in about a year from now (nonono, don't revive the We are losing the browser war thread, please!). Summing it up, freshmeat does make use of style-sheets, javascripts and cookies, but it's usable and even nice on the eye (a matter of taste, I know..) without having them enabled in your browser. Please don't harrass me or others, it's not worth it (I might not even read it). As I'm already dreaming in PHP code (do { mess_with_mind(); } while ($scoop == "asleep");) I honestly hope there's not too much fluff hanging around in the source that needs my attention today or tomorrow. After relaxing a bit I'll start coding again to implement features that haven't made it into the initial release of freshmeat II. For a quick launch party either join Jeff Covey and the gang at LinuxWorld Expo New York or join channel #freshmeat on OpenProjects. Yours, [Comments are disabled]
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source code can i download the source what using in freshmeat.net, because the
sourceforge can be download.
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co-authors I like the new design. It's nice, usefull, and becomes more and more intuitive. But.. why did You drop the co-author(s) feature? It's nice, when there is more than one maintainer. Especially when You gave us the possibility to announce different branches separately...
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A:hover gone? I've just wanted to show a friend the navigation of freshmeat. But no fancy hover effect. He was asking about the differences between old Netscape and new Mozilla. One of the things I've mentioned is the hover effect. OK, I have to show him some other sites ...
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should have kept the design.. I guess, this new "verdi" release will have its features in enhanced functionallity. which I did not test and though not judge on yet).. designwise I really loved the old one and this one steps far behind it ! mourning.. mostart
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Good work ! Good work ! I love it ! Cheers, Olivier. --
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Right hedlines It seems that the right headlines commint from slashdot.org, etc... are not working very well... I see slashdot.org twice, I do not see securityfocus, kuro5hin.org is displyed two times and linuxtoday has disapeared. --
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Hmm... This new design is nice, and I am sure the code is cleaner... but the old design was just so much nicer. The only good thing I see is the new login system, sorry. Why tempt fait? --
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Re: Hmm... what about a section of stats that tells how long the submission queue is ??? Brent
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Thanks for your patience I just wanted to drop in to thank everyone for the patience they've shown while we've worked over the bumps in the road of the site change. When the site launched, three of the staff members were at Linuxworld Expo, and not able to work as much as we would have if we were home. On top of that, we've been passing the flu back and forth to one another and all came home to over a thousand support messages to read and respond to in addition to a large backlog of new submissions and changes to old project records. Thanks to everyone who wrote with both positive feedback and constructive criticism, thanks to scoop for endlessly revising the code, thanks to the staff for whacking down the metric of pending foo, and thanks to CowBot for her constant moo. --
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Re: Thanks for your patience Hey.
I'm curious if it'll be possible to set an option
so that my user info is saved longer than a
browsing session?
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Why?! This new layout really sucks... especially the drop-down menu's at the top. Why did you bother re-doing the site when the old layout worked perfectly well?! Put the old site back!
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backend I saw that ther backend files are temporarily offline..however I wanted to make sure that you plan on putting the recentnews.txt back..??? I have a tcl script that greps thats every hour and reports back to an irc channel for all to to see, so im *hoping, praying* you continue with it's use???
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headlines are headlines are... I did not like the look in the first days, but that's always the case with changing a site that was fine and felt good. So I did wait a few days before make a comment, and well I saw some changes in this time, so most of what I would have noted is already done. Good work. The thing that still does not look nicely is the headline - you know, the line with the project name in it. It has still the size and weight of the entry-keys like 'license' or 'changes'. A headline is a headline - and a headline is bigger and bolder than the text that follows it, it's an old rule, a nd about every newspaper / website I know goes with it. They eye can easily seperate the big-letter lines out - where the bullet does in fact *not* help much. Can you do something about it, pls?
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Re: headlines are headlines are... Actually the headlines are in bigger text. You just need a browser that supports CSS better. Unfortunately many of us stuck using Netscpae 4.x on unix workstations are SOL.
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Getting WAY closer Patrick; Looking Much better. I can now continue to use Freshmeat as a working portal, for now I see the SecurityFocus and other external lists. Nice. The thing that's missing most in what i think would be a perfectly usable Freshmeat is the Cookies. Gimme cookie auth. Heck, I'm not sure who else would even want such a thing - for the paranoid think that cookies are going to hack into their computer and turn on their blender - but I really like the idea of using cookies to store user preferences .. considering their initial raison d'etre, imho not a bad use. What about it - gimme the ability to save user preferences like object filters, so that I can lose the perl modules, and I'm a 100 % happy Freshmeater! (yeah, another one turned to the Dark Side of FM][ )
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Scratch that - I'm still pissed - was Re: Getting WAY closer Okay. This is going to look suck-ass to anyone readong, so I'll disclaim
and explain my beef at the same time. I'm using COMM476, which can neither
Edit articles via the back button, nor can it allow me to put in a carriage
return adequately to save my own freakin life. So, I now have two
requests: 1) fix the freakin editor page, and 2) gimme my cookies so I
don't haev to log in every time NS crashes. Apologies for the horrid
format of this message, and I may start trying to edit things for
appearance once I have the ability and my apathy over the appearance
becomes unfounded. - bish
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Filtering by license? It would be nice if one could filter announcements by the license field. I'm usually not interested in seeing announcements for non-free software.
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Re: Filtering by license?
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New Design Hi, I hate new design when I saw it before couple of days. And it was ugly, really. But today it is different - much more nicer, with more space, and normal font sizes.So, thank you, great job! Keep it that way! --
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Lounge? Please, can you bring us back the lounge account? I'm dead without it.Thanks.
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Re: Lounge?
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Lauds and a couple frustrations Hey, the new Trove classification scheme is extra-nifty. My not being able to log in under Mozilla isn't :(. I'd like to make one honest suggestion, though: the "][" icons *have* to go. I know where I am. Being reminded of that fact 1-70 times a page is a little too much. Thanks for the service, though...
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PLEASE BRING BACK THE NEWS SERVER !! The new look is meaningless to me. I MUCH preferred using the news server and my favorite news server. PLEASE BRING BACK THE NEWS SERVER !!
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Back Button to edit articles? Um, when I hit my back button to edit articles (the text area for which no longer shows up if my Comm476 has Style Sheets option on), I the fields are blank. Had I the chance, I'd have sent a comment saying that things are really looking up with this new version, and that I had a few suggestions: - Lose the login screen. I LIKE cookies. I've loved with them for many, many years. I want my FM to actually KNOW who I am, and not force me to log in every fricking time Netscape crashes, just so I can enable my no-perl filter on the new stuff (which seems to up the coding quality of submissions at the same time it halves the number of entries on the page). Look at Sourceforge, with their requirement you log in every time you go to their site. Do I log in? No; it's too much friggin hassle. Instead, I answer tech support questions anonymously and it's just as fast. If the goal is to make me see the beauty of these lovely features - messaging, filtering, all that - but I still have to friggin log in every time I re-run netscape, then you can keep your features, and I'll use about as much of them as I use the ones on sourceforge. - Where's my BeBits, Telephony, Security and all that stuff? it was the first thing I read when I got here in the morning, and nothing goes with coffee like FM's version of the News. - where's the NEW stuff part? Other than that, it's shaping up to something I can almost use again. You know, almost like I can Work with it. - bish
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Thanks for listening to criticism Thanks for changing the ugliest bugs of the first release of FM II. The link buttons are now useable again for opening a new window, the license information is back, there are seperator lines and the blue area on the left is gone. Nice. Very nice. I still dislike the yellow button at evey entry (It's not exactly version II of every project announced on FM II, right?), but that is probably a matter of taste and apart from that I really like the new appearance now. A suggestion for your next layout change: PLEASE, announce it one month before release and install it on a different machine so people can test-drive it, before it goes into production. I suppose almost none of the ugly bugs would have made it into the final design by doing so. Nobody would have been shocked, and you would not have had such a hard time going through all that hate-mail. ;-)
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Just a Suggestion What I'd really like to see in the user prefs is a way of setting my timezone, so that on any page where a date/time is printed it comes up in my local time. In fact every web site should do this and it should be part of ECMAScript or something.
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Grr! Changes part 2. Errors When adding a comment: the instructions tell you to 'back button' to fix any problems with your post. When you hit back-button, you lose all of your text. And of course, forward just takes you to a 'this page is out-of-date' error screen. If you're going to 'pragma no-cache', at least but links to re-type on the proofing page that re-fill the text boxes. Having to retype comments all the time is bound to incurr some serious flameage. Also, as noted previously, users signatures aren't being formatted correctly during inclusion. Thirdly, bring back the [prev][next] day buttons at the top of the news page. it's quite inconvenient to scroll to the bottom, read upwards (forwards in time) and then have to scroll all the way back to the bottom just to go to the next day. (or previous) --
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Re: Grr! Changes part 2. Errors sheesh! And now the body loses it's formatting! What's going on here? I'm using raw text mode for all of my comments, but it's being treated as html-encoded?? --
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The best No matter how it looks, fm is alvays *the best * site out there.
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Re: The best
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Separators in email-announcements HI, The separator in the daily email needs to be more visible. With the current design, it is way too hard to browse through the email quickly to find specific entries. A nice solid 72 character line with the project title immediately below would be nice. René.
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Nice Nice redesign. I'm sure that when everybody gets used to it, nobody will
ever complain. P.S. This is quite annoying though, when you add a comment, go to the preview page, see something is wrong, and press "Back" to edit, the entire comment is gone.
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I'm sorry.. I know you must have worked hard with this new interface, and I know nothing about internal structure-changes.. But I must say that the previous design kicked ass compared to this one.. It's so... Lame. ;P I mean.. Even adding black outlines/borders on the different fields would improve design.. But still.. The old design rocked.
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Funny Yellow Button? Kill it. The funny yellow button is everywhere. It's like the Big Bullet From Hell or something.
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Re: Funny Yellow Button?
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app index i liked the old applaction index better... i find it strange how the 'main catagory' section is on the right, and the sub catagory is on the left... also the blue thing on the left along with the grey thing on the right is kinda ugly, the content in the left should move to the left and join the other content in the blue thing... i like the old site much better, but i am sure i will get over the changes, and get use to the new layout... [i am amazed i still rember my login and user name i normally don't post any commets to freshmeat]
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Re: app index
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I want my Slashdot & Other News Freshmeat was my entryway to Slashdot and other news sources. At least make it a personal option for me to view these links. Even PHPNuke lets you do that. I have been using Freshmeat since before the last design... back then people complained about that interface.... so I won't complain about the new one. I'm not sure if the interface needed to be changed though.... Freshmeat is like a Yahoo!...... and they should be commended for sticking to their interface all these years.
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Ehr... shocking First of all I must apologize for my english, as the Gods made me speak italian and my english is quite rusty at the moment. And now, the comment... First of all, I really miss the category tag in the software list boxes; it was the fastest way to take a look at the homepage and understand if there was something the kind of what you were searching for. Now you have to go through each description to realize what the item relly is, and it in quite annoying. Further on, I do agree with the other comments I read about the fixed-size fonts (a relative scaling would be long more fair) and the wasted ~200 pxls on the left. Globally, anything was much more visible before the modification, and the contents strucked as the browser rendered the page; now it seems lacking in personality... I don't have the words to put in the right terms but I hope it can be understood. Any other criticism that may be moved (where' is the good old logo? and so on) are just a matter of getting-used-to, and all of us will (I suppose we'll have to), but the first points are strategical. Anyway thanks for the efforts, the site and the crew are a good of humanity :) Daniele
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When will the newsserver work again Hello, The design of the freshmeat frontend does not affekt me so much, because I prefer getting my software news using the newsserver, but the gateway seems to be gone? Will it work again, and when yes, when will it be? Cheers Berthold
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Go back to the old daily summary order The old, newest first, ordering of the daily summary email was much better than the new alphabetical. With the old format, I could read until I hit what I had already seen on the web site if I visited that day. With the new format I am forced to read the whole list.
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Re: Go back to the old daily summary order Amen, brother. :-) Could we have it at least as a preference in the daily
newsletter setup page? Something like
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Re: Go back to the old daily summary order Uhm, so this option in my preferences to sort frontpage by Date(reverse) isn't wanted?
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Re: Go back to the old daily summary order Slap me around. I don't get the newslestter ;(
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Freshmeat overhaul, part 2 Seems like most of the warts are gone now: the projects exist again, the link to this page works, the license info is back, the select boxes for links are gone. And it's readable. Good work. Time to stop complaining and start updating application records. Ulric
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Suggestion for left bar, option For the most part, my opinion on the new design is ``it's different; let's try it and see''. A few things become apparent after only a short time, however. A few `minor' elements of the design could be configurable to great positive effect. In particular: *The left bar contains very little useful information for the space it occupies. An option to put all of its contents in the right bar would be a big help. *The two text `tool bars' along the top are too long, causing some text-mode browsers to do terrible things (basically, the overly-wide top bar is forcing a `page width' wider than the terminal width, which results in horizontal scrolling and a complete lack of usability. links is especially painful in this sense, but most textmode browsers have to resort to ugly tricks. *In my opinion, regardless of whether you use selection boxes or icons, they should be on the same line as the `License' and `Release Focus' entries. Thanks
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Re: Suggestion for left bar, option Replying to myself, the latest version seems to have adequately adressed all of my suggestions. Thank you very much.
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Freshmeat looks horrible. [ I should note that, until today, I've never felt a need ] [ to log in, and don't plan to comment again soon... this ] [ is certainly a very poor way to elicit my first remark. ] I'm sorry to say this, but my first reaction to loading freshmeat today was 'aiee... freshmeat changed'. The old layout was, IMO, far better than the new one; it was much less visually noisy. I use kfm to browse, so fortunately I don't have to see your new font style, but that doesn't help particularly much. Moving the login panel to the other side of the screen just creates a distracting empty space below, and after ten seconds on a laptop, that bright blue bar becomes simply hideous. Since there's no font color setting, my default font color (grey) is nearly unreadable in the blue area, and the link color (blue) creates further distraction. Against this layout, the articles fade away into the background; the most prominent feature is that ugly ubiquitous yellow icon. And even though the ad banner (I assume that's what the blank rectangle next to the logo is, thanks junkbuster) takes up less space on the page, it's now more obnoxious than before because it now splits the top of the page along the blue bar, instead of forming a page-width header. Additionally, the new project design seems it could use re-evaluating; it's unsettling to think that every file is now unattributed... To summarize: I have nothing good I can say about the changes; freshmeat now looks horrible.
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Re: Freshmeat looks horrible. It's interesting to note that 'step two' of the comment entry looks nothing like the end result...
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Re: Freshmeat looks horrible. Yes it does! Please bring the old Freshmeat back!!! Pleeeeeeease!!!
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Re: Freshmeat looks horrible. I agree... This is definetly not the freshmeat i grew to love over the years. It actually looks like a girlz site now? What's with those colors? I dunno. Im only 1 person and my opinion is usually discarded by most but let me tell you, you had something going on the original site. How about having both sites up? I have seen sites do that. Have a link on the front page so people can choose. I choose the old site. Looked great, worked great, it WAS freshmeat.
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Re: Freshmeat looks horrible.
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Avantgo channel hehe... just one small request... A Freshmeat channel on Avantgo would be nice ;)
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BROKEN LINKS hmm... You need to fix something about the project details... when i do a search for x-chat, it comes up with an exact match (http://freshmeat.net/projects/x-chat/), but when i click the link i get "We encountered an error The specified project doesn't exist. "
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Re: BROKEN LINKS
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What if we could have choices between layouts It could be a good idea to let choices for users. They may choose the new layout, or the old one.(i'm talking only for the news page). A little bit like the sourceforge themes works. bye.
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Re: What if we could have choices between layouts Oh yeah, that would be great. I miss the old fm
allready. I dont like the new one.
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Re: What if we could have choices between layouts
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Project detail pages show submitters as N/A Seems to happen for all projects, even though the submitter shows up correctly on the browse and home pages.
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Re: Project detail pages show submitters as N/A This is address in the article at the top. It's a fairly simple procedure and painless, but it caused a lot of confusion. If scoop had sent out a mass mailing to the submitters (can he do that?) it would have saved some grief and confusion. At the minimum we should have been given advance notice that something was going to need our attention.
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The left blue column is too wide It's better, faster, etc, but the left blue column is much too wide and it only contains a few items.
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Much better!!! Now, with arial/helvetica ... it looks way better than with the sucking tahoma. I can actually read it now :) It fits my 800x600 screen perfectly now. Thanks for this improvement! (Although Freshmeat is useable again, still liked the old one better) --
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why redirs? hi, one problem I have with freshmeat (the old and the new one) are the redirections for the 'home page' / 'download' / 'changelog' buttons. I really hate this. Before I click on a link, I want to know whereto this link takes me, I want to be able to copy a link into the clipboard and I want to be able to use the "save as" feature of my browser with the 'download' link. Why don't you let a link be a link? What are the advantages of redirections for the user? And another problem: I had to type in this text twice. Going back from 'Step 2' for correcting a typo cleared the form fields??? Beside this: freshmeat is a great service. Thanks for your work! Regards, Corvin PS: I liked the old layout more, but that's a matter of taste...
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Re: why redirs? This one is easy. It is a simple way to have counters for link hits.
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Re: why redirs?
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What about the users? FreshMeat is here for the users. (i believe/hope). You now have had many complaints about the new layout. And, it IS hard to navigate, and easily get the titles that are interresting. (and dont say 'you'll get used to it') So are you going to listen to us, the users, and hopefully do something about this?
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Please give white-on-black titles back! Please make a way of getting good old white-on-black sw titles back! It was *much* easier just to quckily scroll through the page, capturing the titles and stopping only at those what interested. The new yellow ][ circles and hlines are much difficult to catch :-(
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Sooner or later I think sooner or later, we are all getting tired of the yellow (][) bulletin.....
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Re: Sooner or later This is what really sucks about critiquing. The logo by itself doesn't look all that bad imo. But when you see it over and over next to the blue menu... well, it sticks out and doesn't feel very good. So basically something that someone was very happy and proud of just doesn't fit with the rest of the site. Maybe if you greyscaled it it would look better.
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MySQL Error: Server shutdown in progress ...hope that's for downgrading to FM 1. --
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Privateness The pages for logged-in users aren't marked as "private" at the HTTP level (for cache-control). This is an obvious issue for users behind a proxy. --
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I miss the Lounge... I miss being able to see only new stuff since my last reset. The new freshmeat looks spiffy, but please give me back my Lounge... --
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from left to right As I am used to reading from left to right and top to bottom, this menu at left disturbs me alot. It feels unnatural to see the main text at the right side of the page. Could this be made optional? I think I can get used to this new look in few weeks, but I really would like to see the menu at the side of my mousehand.
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Re: from left to right
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Do it better workshop ! Ok, a couple of fmII users are confused about the new fm
layout/design/whatever. --
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Horizontal scrollbar & quick navigation Okay, two more comments:
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Sorry, but... I didn't like most of the changes. I don't give a fuck to the new look since I'm a Lynx user, but I can say there's no difference with this browser. First off, where are "new items since your last reset"? And could you please thread the comments and make new appear first? Also, Top 20 sucks, but Top 20 users by login count is ridiculous. So, I shouldn't use cookies to be listed? I hope that now any user comments can be edited or removed by the given user, and that when he changes his name or e-mail his announcements and comments get the changes.
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OSDN/Banner Like many others, I found that the OSDN links and banner ad were taking up too much space on the page (even with squid and sleezeball to not show banner images, the space was still getting wasted), so I made up a little perl script to go between my web browser and proxy server that strips out any unwanted HTML. Right now, it only works if you have a proxy server and for some reason can't handle POST requests. If you're interested, grab it at http://include.detour.net/~amedico/modifyingproxy.pl.
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uhhh wtf i don't vist for one day and the who site turns to hell. --
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More Fuel My quick comments -- nothing new but maybe it'll help sway the right people. Want boxes back. Text is too big. Where are the quick links to securityfocus etc? My eyes hurt after trying to read. This new layout is not easy to follow.
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Missing information on FM ][ After FreshMeat was switched to FM ][, the old hit counters of the projects were missing!
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wide load! new format would be great if only articles would actually fit on a 1024x768 monitor. once thats fixed then we can talk about getting it to fit into a window which is smaller thn 1024x768... will be perfect once it can look good on both my desktop and my dinky 800x600 laptop display.
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Re: wide load!
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Yikes! I'm usually one who is always for spiffy new designs. This isn't bad but has a few glaring problems. Number 1: Size down those huge fonts! Yuck! The OSDN bar and the [HOME | BROWSE | etc. bar takes up heaps of spaceand dominates way too much. I run 1280x1024, but always with my browser windows taking up half a screen size. The fonts are extremely hard to read at that size, but somewhat bearable if I choose 'Smaller' Text scaling in IE5.5 . Number 2. get rid of the horizontal scrolling - NOW! Firstly, it's a menace to read in anything other than 1280x1024 full screen. That is just *wrong*. Secondly, you know why newspapers have articles in smallish columns? It's because wide lines of text are very difficult to read and nasty on the eye. The current situation, with the huge fonts and the wide lines is a typographic nightmare! Number 3. More distinction between days on the main page/right column. It's all a bit of a blur. Number 4. If I didn't know better, I'd think that this place was called thinkgeek or something. The logo is tiny, and is dwarfed by the ad banner next to it. It really looks as if the ad banner is the title for the page! I liked the wide old banner very much. Apart from that, the new features are nice, and pretty changes in style are always welcome. However, these usability problems need to be fixed.
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Re: Yikes! And I just found another bug. Line breaks in plain text mode show up fine in the preview, but get destroyed when it's actually posted.
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my browser and restatement of problems mozilla cvs. page too wide. second gray horizontal bar is hard to use. blue column too thick. weak separation of comments. font shouldn't be bold. you shouldn't have more than 66 characters on a line. "step 2" = ? my friend can't view this page with lynx (blank)
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Satisfying the urge... I understand better than most the need to satisfy the urge, but don't... The old FM was much easier to read than this one...
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good job, but too much wasted space. i honestly would rather use the old interface. i want to get it, read whats new, and leave. if i wanted pretty i'd go to maximmag.com :) thx matt
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Lynx Mode I'm happy to see that freshmeat is still usable in lynx. Sometimes I absolutely have to browse freshmeat using lynx. However, it would be really nice if we could get a light mode such as slashdot has for when I have to view freshmeat view lynx, a PDA, or my cell phone. Yes, I know this is a crazy thing to do, but there's a lot of crazy people here and we need to do crazy things to be happy.
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Necessary Feature I think it's really important that we have the ability to see what new additions there have been since last time we logged on. This was available in the old version and I don't think I can use freshmeat without it. Unfortunately, I can't find that option in the new interface. I fear that it might have been done away with. Can we please have this again? Thanks!
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benefits of new design great thing about new look is that page has less
tables.
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New design... OK, a new design.. my first though when opening the site for the first
time? Awe. I love the new logo at the top.
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Looks great This just looks great. FM ][ -- like the Apple ][. Linux on an Apple ][ ? Hmmmmm. --
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Useless features "Top 20 Users by Logins" (on stats page) and "Sessions" page - does anybody know what purpose they serve? Not only is it an invasion of privacy (sort of), but totally useless on top of that. This is a second 'paragraph', just for testing.
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Re: Useless features "Top 20 Users by Logins" (on stats page) and "Sessions" page - does anybody know what purpose they serve? Not only is it an invasion of privacy (sort of), but totally useless on top of that. This is a second 'paragraph', just for testing. [rant]Brilliant. Just brilliant. When submitting a comment in "raw text" mode, line breaks between paragraphs show up correctly in the preview, but in the final posted comment - no breaks! Doesn't anybody test code before putting it live any more?[/rant]
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this interface needs help, its bloated! What's with the *huge wasted space* on the right hand side? Get rid of that light blue column, useful text on the items can fit there. The old interface had too many frilly boxes tables that took up space and made rendering slow. This one wastes the screen real estate with useless columns. The info in the columns best goes both at the top and bottom of the page or on the same column as the last-few-days view.
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Too wide - why? My first impressions: - on my Libretto with IE5, the FM page seems at least 1280 wide, making the text unreadable (I need to scroll 1 screen left/right FOR EACH LINE OF TEXT. Highly annoying. I didn't have this problem with FM1). - left bar; takes up a lot of space (and besides, the BGCOLOR is ugly ;)) - fixed font size != nice I do appreciate the efforts though; please read this as constructive criticism... Gxis! Ed.
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Re: Too wide - why? ... and why does the paragraph formatting which looked correct in preview mode suddenly disappear after posting? Gxis! Ed.
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Post a static page with the old look and feel? Is there any chance that the folks at fm would be willing to post a static page in the old fm style? I'm sure you're going to keep 95% of the new style intact, and that's cool with me, but some of us really really admired the old look and would love to have a page of it or even a gif to refer to. Maybe all of the freshmeat styles are ground breaking, maybe not, but at the very least it's an interesting evolution. And while I personally never saw the older editions of fm, after reading some of the posts about how nice those were, I'd love to see them also.
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Jeebus... The formatting is off on IE. Paragraphs are too wide, making that horizontal scroll bar pop into existence.
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'My' Page How about making the 'My Page' more configurable? The 'Recent (project|article) comments" sections are relatively useless. A way to track selected projects might be more useful. Also, am I the only one who thinks that the "(][)" image is way overused? It seems to precede every bit of title text but serves abosolutely no purpose. One more thing - not only are email addresses on project pages auto-obfuscated (is address-harvesting by spammers *that* likely?), but the link isn't a mailto:. I can't click to email someone and even after copying and pasting the address must be edited. (I wonder if putting a correctly formatted email address as the 'fake' address would at least allow quicker cutting and pasting?). I don't mind change - when the new is *better* than the old, that is.
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A few layout changes needed... Other than a few layout changes, the new site is good... lot's of features... A few recommendations: 1) The blue bar on the left is too big and too blue... it could be replaced by a box for the login form and the rest can be plain white space or a bit more neutral color (gray). 2) The center column used to have more distinctions between different entries... not there's just a small line which does not do enough to create any visual distinction... it all just blends together into one big page. To please everyone (ok fine not everyone but many people), you could make the stylesheet dynamic and allow ways for people to change certain attributes such as font style, colors and such. Then if someone complains that they don't like the blue strip, you could simply say "go change it then!".. and if you already have some db entries for each registered user, adding a few more fields shouldn't be too much work. /11oh8
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My Own Opinion Hello Just wanted to voice my meager opinion. I 99% agree with the post above entitled: "how about some constructive criticism" - by kellan - ps, the bottom scroll kinda sucks too. Many thanks for continuing to offer this really great service!! --
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how about... How about two things: 1. don't fix the article width in pixels, as it seems to be... I'm on a 1024x768 monitor and I have to scroll left and right just to read this 2. let us specify the font size in our preferences
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First impressions... Overall, I like the new features but I think the visual design needs some work. The single most apparent problem is the lack of anything distinctive (other than the small yellow icon) to seperate one entry from the next. The old design had well-defined borders around each entry that made it very easy to see what was part of the entry you were looking at and what was not. With the new borderless design, it's a bit harder to see where one entry ends and another begins. Ones simple solutions would be to put a light grey bar at the bop or bottom of each entry - for example, you could put those tiny link icons at the bottom in a greay bar or maybe the yellow icon at the top. The only other complaint I have is with the layout. It's way too wide for people who don't run their browsers maximized (which is most people, I would think). If there was a way to make your layout size itself to fit the browser rather than requiring the user to resize their browser to fit your particular site, that would be nice. Actually, I think Freshmeat I was also a fixed size but it was not nearly as wide. Even with my browser maximized on a 1280x1024 screen, I still can't see all of the page without scrolling left and right. I'd recommend a width somewhere in the 600 - 800 range... Other than those two complaints thought, the new features look great!
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Please recover old appindex contributed comments. It appears the old appindex contributed comments have disapeared in the changeover. Please restore them! These comments have been contributed over the years and were critical to assessing the state, usage, and value of the software in the index. This was what made freshmeat the most useful place to search for software.
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BUG: search is slightly broken if you search for something that gives, for example, 50 results, and you go to result page 3 (offset=40), then enter another search query, the new results will also have offset=40, giving you an empty screen if there were less than 40 results, and being bogus anyway.
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Jan 99 or Jan 98 What is he talking about, my id was made jan 1998, user # 00015?????? Creation date: Friday, January 16th 1998 20:34
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Step backwards imho I'm using IE5.5 and it's no-where near as readable. Column on left to wide, column on right to small, text almost unreadable, not as easy to see each section, miss the easy to spot priority of upgrade. All in all nowhere near as good as the old version. Don't suppose you can roll back can you? Er sorry it's not more positive. Phillip.
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amateurish design the problems: - I have to maximize the browser (1280x1024) to see anything (I use a laptop and pity anyone using one with less definition) - Even then, discussions don't necessarily wrap, so I have to side scroll - I used to be able to see 3 article per page, now I see only two. - The three icons (home-page, source, full description) were nice and much more usable than the current drop box... Did you test this on more than one browser? Did you think that maybe not everyone has a 21 inches screen with 1600x1200 definition? Can I go back to the old version? This is pretty bad.
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horizontal scroll bar the bottom scroll bar is the most annoying thing ..
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Re: horizontal scroll bar
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how about some constructive criticism i realize that probably under 200 comments amounting to "this sucks", its unlikely you'll ever see this post. i'm glad there are new features, i hope they work as nicely as they found, but i'm totally turned off by the new design, and here is why: 1. the whole page is a table (minus the ad of course) this is very very noticeable slow, and unpleasant. 2. the blue bar on the left runs down the entire page, significantly impacting the amount of space to display content. and yet it adds VERY little to the page, just a few links, and a search box near the very top of the page. this is very poor use of space. 3. the gray bar on the right is hard to read, not hard to read if i sit there and look at it, but hard to read if i'm trying to skim a list of 100 newly added applications in 30 seconds, which is, in truth, what people do. 4. information is not clearly divided. its hard to visually breakup the new entries in the center column the yellow circle is supposed to help i assume (as it doesn't add any other functionality and is repeated over and over and over) and yet it also fails to convey any info. (its a meaningless icon) 5. similar problems in the right hand bar, no clear separation of days, if i'm scrolling down the page, Monday blurs into Sunday blurs into Saturday. 6. Some people have pointed out the similarity with k5. K5's interface is overwhelming, but I was willing to deal w/ that, adjust, spend the time learning it, because there is an amazing amount of interaction going on at k5. this is not the case w/ freshmeat. I know its fun to work on community features, but I really don't see how they improve freshmeat all that much. (Especially if they come at the expense of the old feature set was immensely popular) 7. doing another quick once other or the site, i can't emphasize enough how hard that center column is to use. what was wrong w/ the old boxes? they were cool and usable! ditto in the actual project detail, all the information because a jumbled mess. (and that damn meaningless icon shows up again) 8. don't do it. do we need another community site? if you want to work on a community site, work on the bender code, or scoop, or squishdot. instant messaging in scoop would be an awesome addition, especially if it could optionally get logged somewhere like your diary. that way we could take a lot of the more vitriol debates "offline". 9. i'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that when i click on the totally uninformative "Step 2" button, I'll be brought to a page where I can preview this comment?
thanks, kellan
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Re: how about some constructive criticism I agree wholeheartedly with the above comments, and would also like to add something about all this startquote .. endquote and percentage sign rubbish! What is up with that? The blue column on the left should be turned into a blue box on the right hand side. That would be much more better, easier on the eye, and make better use of the space on the webpage. The column on the right isn't big enough either - projects take up multiple lines because the font is too big and the column too small. Days are hard to tell apart. And the middle column. What a mess. Talk about hard to read mess with stupidly arranged options around each project. What happened to compactness?
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Re: how about some constructive criticism I feel I need to add that the BOLD colored links need to be toned down a bit. They are too dark and stick out too much on some browsers. So take it down a few percentage points and see what that looks like. Also, any chance we'll have a download hit counter? Otherwise I'm just going to delete the download link for my project and make everyone funnel through the homepage link. I second, third, and fourth the people saying the page is too hard to visually break down. Our eyes need more clues as to when a different entry begins and ends. I know you probably don't want to hear it again but the original way of using a box was excellent in this regard. The HR line doesn't cut it. I think the yellow ][ icon has got to go or be changed (grayscaled?) It clashes too much with the blue. I can't rememebr what the older site used. On a positive note: I really like the FM][ greyscale logo in the top left of the page. Really nice. And I appreciate the internal architecture changes. Having written my own projects I know that must have taken a lot of time, thought, and effort. Hopefully everything will catch up. I've already started noticing some tweaks here and there.
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Feature and other stuff I would love to have the ability to be able to specify (in my preferences) the number of entries to show on the front page. You could have a default setting for users not loggged in and override that if the user is logged in. I really like that you don't have to page down to see core info on the projects pages. And I see how the blue bar is not a distraction in these cases if you are the project owner and are logged in. But, as others have stated, it's pretty useless on the front page where probably 75% of your audience is spending the vast majority of their time.
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users/not-available All my projects are attributed to the "N/A" user? Now I have to get all of them back? This is annoying. Furthermore, what's with the "Tar/gz" assumption? What if the download is just a single file, like a script? I prefer the Download tag from before. --
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Re: users/not-available Read the note at the top of the page. We should have been notified via email. (but I guess this should probably have been expected from this type of service).
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yea...sorry but, i hate to jump on the "change-is-bad-bandwagon" but, its really confusing. i mean it's not just the fact that its a change. it REALLY is seriously confusing and unreadable. :( --
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New Layout I like it! Here's some constructive criticism to go along with that.. (I tested it in IE5 and Konqueror/KDE 2.1beta/Mandrake) - The blue bar on the left is WAY too wide. - The bar on the right isn't wide enough (at least in IE5 with default settings, small fonts), there's a lot of word wrapping in the previous day's software releases, which makes the list seem longer than it really is. - The drop-down menus really are kinda annoying, I liked the old icon system. I'm sure I'll come up with more as I play with it. Thanks for a great site. =)
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The New look is nasty! Bring back the old freshmeat.net This new look is aweful! Im running at 1024x768 and i have to scroll right to read the whole article! Who had their head up their butt when they were writing this! Over all its just not as clean. I like the new logo, but the new layout is not cool. Especially for new users! Reminds me of trying to navigate through the Micro$oft webpages. Its horrible!
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"Never change a working system"... Well, thanks for your work, but the older design was better. The other people already told what was wrong with the select. I also miss the boxes, and don't like this big lightblue column there : takes _way_ to much space for nothing. Please create an http://fm1.freshmeat.net! :) Or add customisable templates. The only thing I find better yet are the comments system, but that could have been added without throwing everything away..
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Re: "Never change a working system"... Ok, thanks for the last changes: it looks now *much* better. That is good custumer service :)
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It's Ugly It's really, really ugly... the boxy format from before whas much less confusing and much more aesthetically pleasing...
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From a usability standpoint Concise and to the point: 1) fonts too big 2) while loading, proportional tables are pulsing and moving all over the place 4) drop-down selector == 3 clicks, icon links == 1 click
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Open in new window I really like the new features. However I regularly take interest in several projects at once so it would be nice to be able to open project homepages in a new window. With the old design it was a simple middle-button click. Could that be a preference?
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Whoops - guess that's a little hard to read. Guess I should have looked a little more closely at forcing breaks in my posting. I'm not quite /that/ gung-ho for whitespace compression.
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Bring back the real FM Somehow I was under the illusion that only manufacturers had a policy of improving things until they were totally worthless, but FreshMeat has proved that to be wrong. Freshmeat used to be easy to read and easy to find software and updates. Now it is extremely hard on the eyes and very confusing to try and figure out what you're reading. I don't know whose brilliant idea this new look was, they they obviously are more interested in glorifying themselves by creating a "new desighn" than they are in creating a useable resource. --
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Wasted Space I know you put a lot of work into this and I hope you'll take this as constructive criticism instead of distressed flamage. My big complaint with the new main page setup is the wasted space, mostly vertical. It was easy to quickly scroll through the old setup with about four new submissions a page and look for interesting new stuff. The hard coded font sizes, the almost completely wasted new bar on the left side, the large amounts of vertical white space, the new link format, and the lack of real vertical separation (the teeny thin bar really doesn't do the job) all contribute to making that tougher. Is it usable? Yes. Selfishly, is it as suited at doing what I primarily use Freshmeat for, looking daily for new releases? In my opinion, no. Turning off style sheets and overriding a few things makes it better, but that seems a bit of brutal overkill. I imagine a lot of this is just different browser weirdness and it looks fine on what you're using. But, while I don't want to overangst (end of the net predicted!), the efficient layout of lots of information for fast access is a tougher thing than it seems like it would be, and people who are upset about the fact that their new freshmeat doesn't look as nice to them won't even get to the point of checking out the neat new underlying functionality. I hauled Netscape out of cold storage and noticed that the new look renders much faster for people who're still stuck with that, which is a good thing. Suggestions for the main page: * Kill the fixed fonts sizes. 12 pt? * Kill all the vertical whitespace at the bottom, such as between the Changes and License and URL lines. * Full width separator lines * Move the left bar elsewhere * Kill the URL selector for hard links, but I see you've already been convinced to do that. I know it's a pain, I go through this whenever I release something new and public, and I bitch and whine and moan about users never being happy, but I find that if enough people are complaining about something specific that maybe I really do need to revisit that. Good luck.
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Nick Thieves Here Already I come here several times a day, and I try and signup as soon as I saw the username/password feature. However some bastard has already stolen my username forcing me to append a number ;-[
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cmon.. People do not come to freshmeat to exchange messages. Stop thinking people use your site more than they do. Get rid of the inbox. |
